Let us now consider the role of darkness in the myths of the Great
Comet.

Throughout Mesoamerica, the arrival of the cosmic night was a
pervasive subject of ritual re-enactment, from macrocosm to
microcosm; the darkness into which the world sank symbolically at
the end of the 52-year cycle was the same darkness remembered with
each setting of the sun, as every household recalled the dangers
of the greater darkness in primeval times.

But the doomsday fears of Mesoamerican peoples do not just reflect
the ancient experience of a darkened world. At the root of these
fears is a memory of the "chaos-hordes" let loose, the great
cometary cloud which overtook the world in the mother of all
catastrophes. Numerous ritual celebrations represented this
swarming cometary debris by crowds of warriors and other
participants adding through their dress and gestures the elements
of commotion, disarray, darkness, and mock combat--these frenzied
crowds being as much a part of the ritual occasion as the
officiating priests or sacrificial victims. The panoply of images
involved here will provide countless details about an event far
more terrifying than historians have dared imagine.

The crucial principle is the connection between ritual symbols and
remembered events: the local rites commemorated death and disaster
on a COSMIC scale. Thus, all of the components of the "darkness"
theme are significant--throngs of people shouting in confusion or
running about; the feathered ornaments; paper streamers waving in
the wind; a pervasive fear that their children will be turned into
mice; the fear that monsters with disheveled hair (a global
cometary motif) will rise out of the darkness to devour them.
Indeed, such themes constitute a tapestry of ancient cometary
myths and symbols. And the repeated fears and gestures are not
fixed to a single rite or to just one symbolic occasion, but to
every level at which the darkness theme occurs.

Symbolically, for example, every setting of the sun contained an
aspect of the former disaster. When dusk arrived it came as a
reminder of the cosmic night--the twilight of the gods. Natives of
pre-Columbian Mexico retired to their own dwellings and covered
themselves. At night the chaos-demons were out, and children
could be turned into mice (a mythical form of the swarming
celestial debris with cometary tails, the "children" of the comet-
goddess). And while the people slept, it was the priest
astronomer's duty to monitor the heavens at dusk, midnight and
dawn, to "divine the course of events." In the shadow of the
remembered catastrophe, every form of darkness contained a seed of
uncertainty and terror.

Then, in the morning, the obligatory sweeping of patios and
walkways occurred--symbolically, the sweeping away of the night.
Not just the darkness, but the gathered dust and clutter filled a
special role in Mesoamerican daily life and ritual, as symbols of
the great dust-cloud which overtook the world in ancestral times.
So in the sweeping rites, we see the dust as an analog of this
cloud--the chaos hordes--together with the symbolism of the female
head of the house as "sweeper," a role defined by the mother
goddess Toci herself, whose "broom" is a prominent feature in the
commemorative rites (see discussion of Toci and sweeping rites in
discussion to follow; also later discussion of the "broom" as
universal comet glyph; in the form of a "broom," "flail," "fan,"
or "whisk," the Great Comet itself "scatters" the chaos-cloud.)

No doubt such symbolism at the daily, microcosmic level was
diluted over time and progressively gave way to the growing
complexities of culture and practical necessity, but the residue
of an ancient and unrecognized experience was still there at the
time of the Conquest.

Of course, the recollection of the cosmic night appears in more
dramatic forms when an UNUSUAL occurrence of darkness breaks the
normal pattern. Consider Sahagun's description of the people's
response to an eclipse--

Then there were a tumult and disorder. All were disquieted,
unnerved, frightened. Then there was weeping. The common folk
raised a cup, lifting their voices, making a great din, calling
out, shrieking. There was shouting everywhere. People of light
complexion were slain [as sacrifices]; captives were killed. All
offered their blood, they drew straws through the lobes of their
ears, which had been pierced. And in all the temples there was
the singing of fitting chants, there was an uproar, there were
war cries. It was thus said: "If the eclipse of the sun is
complete, it will be dark forever! The demons of darkness will
come down, they will eat men!"

In these fleeting moments of the eclipse, the people relived the
unforgettable night, repeating the great din of the world-ending
catastrophe and venting their fears of the devouring chaos hordes.
Were these fears, in origin, different from the (tempered) fear of
dusk, or different from the terror aroused by the conclusion of the
52-year cycle (noted in our previous submission)? An
examination of the different contexts will show that the entire
complex of "darkness" fears always recalls the same comet-like
cloud descending upon the world.

It should not surprise us, therefore, that the very same fear is
seen in relation to the eclipse of the moon.

When the moon was eclipsed, his face grew dark and sooty,
blackness and darkness spread. When this came to pass, women
with child feared evil; they thought it portentous; they were
terrified [lest], perchance, their [unborn] children might be
changed into mice; each of their children might turn into a
mouse.

Such fears are rooted in myths and memories the modern world has
failed to comprehend. There is an ARCHETYPE of cosmic "darkness,"
with deeper and broader meaning than could be extracted from any
single commemorative occasion. Alone, the symbols can only point
ambiguously backwards to unrecognized trauma. But in combination,
the symbols will provide a rich profile of the world-ending
catastrophe, accessible to any researcher willing to break free
from a methodology that sees only fragments and asks the fragments
to explain themselves in isolation from the whole.

Of course, the planet Venus would seem an unlikely source of
sky-darkening clouds (or of sky-clearing "sweeping," for that
matter). And yet the remarkable Mesoamerican association of Venus
with the eclipse and darkness has been documented by the vigorous
research of Ev Cochrane. "Like most ancient peoples, the Maya
considered eclipses of the sun to be a time of dire peril,"
Cochrane writes. "It was commonly believed, in fact, that the
world might end during a solar eclipse. In the eclipse tables
contained within the Dresden Codex, an eclipse is symbolized by
the figure of a dragon descending from the glyph of the sun."

On the relationship of the "eclipse"-dragon to Venus, Cochrane
gives us the verdict of the eminent Mayan scholar, Sir Eric
Thompson:

The head of the monster is hidden by a large glyph of the planet
Venus. One is instantly reminded of the Aztec belief that
during eclipses the monsters called Tzitzimime or Tzontemoc
(head down) plunged earthwards from the sky. These monsters
include Tlauizcalpanteculti, the god of Venus as morning star.
It is therefore highly probable that the picture represents a
Tzitzimitl plunging head down toward earth during the darkness
of an eclipse. A glyph immediately above the picture appears to
confirm this identification, for it shows the glyph of Venus
with a prefix which is a picture of a person placed upside down.

A remote star could darken the entire sky? Here we see, in a
clear profile, the dilemma for conventional study. Under the
standard approach to this subject, the images are far too
incredible to have any foundation in natural experience. Hence,
they must be entirely fanciful. And hence, any attempt to see
natural experience in these hieroglyphs must be preposterous.

That is the fundamental circular reasoning on which the modern
understanding of myth and symbol has been constructed. As a
result, the patterns suggesting deeper levels of coherence are not
even noticed. What is unthinkable is of no interest. So we do
not realize that the fear of darkness is not just the fear of
being unable to see clearly. As concretely expressed in myths and
rites, it speaks for a collective memory; and even the lesser
expressions of this fear are but shadows cast by a far greater
terror, when the whole sky became the theater for the twilight of
the gods.